OPEN LETTER

For many years, Sayyid Ali Khamenei has ruled the country ostensibly to establish a virtuous society, promote equality among Iranians, provide prosperity and security in this world and ensure salvation in the other, and fight for egalitarianism and the cause of the downtrodden abroad. In practice, however, he has promoted wickedness instead of virtue; a cult of personality instead of equality; poverty, arbitrary rule, and engineered elections instead of prosperity, security, and the rule of law; and international brinkmanship and support for terrorism instead of peaceful diplomacy. Mr. Khamenei is no good for Iran; worse for the world; and a disaster for the religion>>>

ONLINE

I’m not the first to notice how short the days have become. Ask anybody, even kids, and they’ll say the same. However, I must have been one of the first to suspect God of tampering with time. I mean, how would we know if He moved the earth a bit faster to shorten our days? But I checked, and I was wrong. I sat in front of a good, reliable clock and said it out loud, “One-Mississippi-two Mississippi,” and no, the seconds had the same length and, sure enough, there were sixty of them in each minute>>>

IDEAS

All the way home from the movie Prince of Persia we three cousins fantasized about what we would do if we had a Dagger of Time so that we could go back to our decision points in the past and do things differently. Some stock purchases, college majors, and divorces later we ended up in politics. How should we as a nation have acted so we wouldn’t end up in the mess we’re in? The conclusion was that as individuals we couldn’t change anything, except in unrealistic ways like taking a lot of money out of the country when 6 Tomans could still buy a Dollar and then funding a counter offensive against the dictatorial trends>>>

DIASPORA

America is such a land of opportunity that even our dog seems to have smelled it, and for that he didn’t even need to sniff much. Where else would he find his personal chef, not to mention two doctors waiting to clean up after him while he fusses over the perfect spot to do his business? The open doors of this land never cease to fascinate me. In fact, thanks to the media for wanting to neutralize the abundance of bad news, every day there’s a success story or two sprinkled between headlines>>>

EXPECTATIONS

Immigrant men and women from the Middle East experience changes differently. Men usually experience a sense of loss--loss of control, privileges, and status. On the contrary, women experience a sense of opportunity, freedom and possibilities. The same had happened to my late husband and me. More and more I acted as a curious observer who was soaking up learning opportunities like a sponge, and it strained our marriage when I felt that he acted unmotivated and disinterested in the new changes in his life, regretting the missed opportunities in the old country>>>